Nobody Likes a Snitch
by xShocked
Summary: The town always knew very little about Boogies' Boys, though they seemed to hate them regardless. Jack, after seeing the bias crawl far out of hand, opts to set things right. But his wellmeaning task turns sour as the trio intend to settle a score too..
1. The Nightmare begins

A/N- Well, something new from me. That's a change. This is my first posted NBC fanfic to date (I think), so I hope it isn't another hideous flop. Anyway, the initial plotline of this story has been done a thousand and three times, but it kind of fascinates me. So this is my twist on it, written in a slightly different style so that people won't be bored to death with it. Please review. Reviewing is good.  
  
-Ruri D.  
  
*******************  
  
The persistant, ever changing winds blew throughout the street, gathering long-dead, shrivelled leaves in their icy fingers, tossing them into the air in an erratic arial display. Though the effort was futile, there was no one there to see it. The streets were empty, hollow, despite it being the middle of a beautiful and rather mild autumn night. There would have, in normal circumstances, been a steady trickling crowd of Halloween folk through the cobbled streetway. The band would have normally perched themselves at the corner, playing their haunting tunes to the stray few that waited in awed anticipation. There may have been a fire display put on by the odd pyromaniac or the witches may have set up their small stall, selling their potions, wares and moon-dried herbs to those in need.  
  
But that day, there were none of those things. Merely the wind, howling and throbbing through the laneways, into every crevice, every orifice, as if sensing the dull ache of quiet throughout the town. It was especially persistant outside of the town hall, pining even....   
  
A weatherworn board stood before the doorway, dull and chipped brass letters that differed as every meeting came and passed announced what was unfolding inside. Yes, it was a town meeting alright, but it was very rare in Halloween Town to see every single one of its inhabitants show up of their own accord to one of those. Yet if there were anyone that hadn't been in the hall at the time, anyone to read the chipped letters and see the complete desertification of the city, they would have immediately realised why everyone had taken such an interest to that weeks town meeting in particular. Their was no question about it.  
  
Halloween folk were naturally curious people, and why shouldn't they have been? Their holiday thrived on secrets and surprises, it was their entire basis of life; all they had accustomed to, all they had known. And there were so many things lurking right before their noses to be so very curious about....  
  
*****  
  
"Calm down! Everyone, please!" Jack cried over the ruckus of the crowd, whose rippled conversations were overpowering and strong. Though they were being unbearably noisy due to their unleashed curiosity, Jack couldn't help but be rather pleased with the turnout. There had been so many people attending that seats had become scarce and, finally, standing room only had been available. He knew this meeting was going to be a success and maybe, if all went to plan, it would both quench curiosity and burn all grudge-provoked opinions at the same time. But where were the little guests he expected? Finally, the large crowd heeded their Pumpkin Kings' words and, agonisingly slowly, the conversation died to a harsh whisper, and then to silence.   
  
"Thankyou. I'm incredibly pleased with the turnout of this meeting," he grinned, straightening his jacket and carefully clearing his throat. The crowd sat in anticipated silence. "Now in the past, I know that we've all had some sort of 'thing'," he used his bony fingers to accentuate this motion, "against our guests that will be here today. Even I, who is expected to be fair and just to every member of Halloween Town equally, had a bias of sorts to them."  
  
"But they're just bad, Jack! Once, they rooted up all of my beautiful garlic cloves and then hung them above one of the vampires' front stoops!" a witch with flaky, green-tinged skin piped defiantly from the back row. A tiny vampire toward the middle of the group also stood, an irritated glare plastered on his face translucent face.  
  
"Do you know how many allergic reactions vampires get from even the smallest amounts of garlic, Jack? Do you?! I couldn't go anywhere near my house for weeks! Those little pipsqueaks are good-for-nothing menaces and nothing more!" he cried, folding his arms in defiance. A small, rippled whisper of agreement circulated thoughout the crowd. Jack frowned.  
  
"Listen, please!" the noise burned out slowly, almost reluctantly, before extinguishing completely. Jack sighed, placing a bony hand to his forehead, attempting to place his words carefully before speaking them. "I know they have followed through and executed some awful plans in their time, but you must take into account that these are children we're talking about. Children like to play tricks and make mischief, I know I did!" he cried, grinning slightly as small, brief recollections of his mischievious childhood filled his mind. "Besides, I suppose not having many children around in the first place found them awfully isolated, to the point where they may have thought they only had themselves for company and no one else."  
  
"But they're always back in that Treehouse of theirs. They don't socialise, they rarely come to town to do that. The only time they do come is to make trouble," the demon with the harlequin face cried, clearly angered. Firm nods in approval to what had been said covered the small hall. Even the mayor's head tilted ever so slightly in agreement to the words. Jack sighed for the second time that night.  
  
"Only a few months ago they were with Oogie Boogie! What do you expect from them? Look, the point is that Boogie is gone now, and I know that for a fact," he nodded firmly, his mouth a tight, grim line. "He had a hold on them like nothing I've ever seen. They are children. Children respond to being taken underwing and- since Boogie was the only person that did that to them- he was the one they pledged their allegiances to. They were isolated from us and now that he's gone, they probably don't know any better." There was a contemplative silence from the crowd for a few long, thought-provoked seconds. Jack considered that perhaps, just perhaps, his words had sunken further beneath their skin....until the witch from the back row stood, rather noisily and cried in bitter sardonics;  
  
"Oh boo hoo! That gives them no right to steal my garlic!"  
  
"Or pour deadly nightshade onto the food I was selling!"  
  
"Or put a snake in my saxophone! I breathed in and my stomach was hissing for weeks!"  
  
The defiant, sharp cries from his audience continued, louder and stronger than they had ever been. He shook his head to the noise. It was worse than he had imagined. It would take a lot more than he had first estimated to break down the thick and heavy walls of bias and grudgery inside every one of the people sitting in that audience before him. He sighed helplessly.   
  
'Except maybe Sally,' he thought, grinning every so slightly as he spotted her, looking rather odd and uncomfortable seated between loud, bickering demons with her head hung low, hands thrusted deep into her lap and a firm frown pulled taut across her ragdoll face. She seemed to be the only one in town that saw it the way he did. Then again, she'd always seen things the way he did, hadn't she? Even when no one else would have ever understood. His mouth formed a tight, determined line. By the end of the night, these people would see differently, a little more forgiving, perhaps? And he wouldn't stop until they did.  
  
"Stop your infernal cacaphony and listen to me!!" he cried vehemiously in the loudest, most fearsome voice he could muster from his bony throat at the spur of the second. This time the noise did not taper off reluctantly slow, but merely shut off in the time frame of a nanosecond, as if someone had pressed the stop button on a loud and rather obnoxious record player. Jack breathed in the silence for a second, savoured its smell and sound, before continuing.  
  
"They're children! They'll eventually grow out of it if you give them the chance," he calmed to a certain extent, his eyes sliding to Sally as if for comfort. She shot him a reassuring smile as his eyeline found her own. He turned away quickly and continued. "I came to realising we know very little about this trio, even though we all seem to hate them so. That's why tonight, instead of me attempting and failing to change your mind like this, they're coming for themselves." He shot the crowd a stern, if not terrifyingly manipulative look. "And you will treat them with the respect that you treat anyone else in this room. With the respect that you treat me."   
  
"So where are the little mischief-makers?" The wolf-man called from his seated position, arms crossed in a sardonic huff and his voice tinged with an identical tone. Jack nodded understandingly, though if he'd had lips, he may have been chewing one nervously, hoping that his kind words aimed at the trio weren't all in vain.  
  
"They'll be here. They promised."  
  
"But bear in mind, Jack, that promises are made to be broken," a small and rather scratchy girls voice cut through the whispers in a pitch that differed greatly from the wolf-man's low, husky tones, yet achieved an identical, if not further amount of interest. The crowd immediately tilted their heads backward, turning toward the large, heavy wooden exit door located behind them. They were greeted with a mischievious smile and an oversized, angular witches hat. Immediately the whispers began to circulate once more, this time in a more desperate pitch, as the girl entered, hands neatly folded behind her back and the large and slightly lopsided grin on her face reminding them warily in every way of the identical one she often bore after another intricate and horrible trick had been executed.  
  
"Not that it ever crossed our minds to decieve you, Jack," A boy entered behind the girl, removing his porcelain demons mask and bearing an identical grin to his comrade. The whispers hushed slightly, yet the wary glares did not fade. Jack shot the boy a bemused glance, tapping a bony finger to his chin in thought.  
  
"Yeah, we'd never do that, Jack."The second boy finally appeared, slamming the heavy exit door sharply behind him. The sudden and intense noise of wood against scraping metals caused many to jump slightly in their seats. The hazy, suspicious whispers agonisingly grew to a more grand scale as the trio were calmly approached by two rather large and burly demons, demanding they hand over any tricks or surprises they had stored deep in the folds of their clothes before they even attempted to fully enter the building. After a brief search of their pockets and socks, only one firecracker was found and confiscated (much to Lock's dismay) and the three children were encouraged to approach the worn and chipping stage where Jack patiently awaited their arrival. They stepped rather undaintily onto the platform, and Jack curtiously bowed in their presence.  
  
"You're a little late, but I'm glad you decided to come," he spoke politely, dropping to one knee to speak face to face with them. Though he realised, a little late, that even at a quarter of his full height, he was still at least a skull and a half taller than the tiny trio. He turned to the crowd, they were immersed in private, suspicious conversations, occasionally glancing to the stage and shaking their heads in mock disapproval. He sighed. "Though I'm afraid this lot aren't going to be a very forgiving crowd for you."  
  
"Forget it. We ain't here for them," Lock threw his hand vaguelly in the whispering crowds direction, his voice droned steadily in its usual pitch, a well-blended mix of bemusement and impatience, "we're here for the candy you promised us if we came," he muttered, his eyes glinted hungrily. His cohorts nodded in agreement not far behind his back, the mischievious glint also sparking in their eyes. Jack nodded, though couldn't help a faint, if not watery smile to shine through his features.  
  
"Of course. But I've decided you'll recieve your little.... incentive... after the meeting is over. I'm sure this won't trouble you though, will it?" Jack wasn't a fool, he knew their ticking, manipulative little minds all too well. He knew they would have nabbed the candy and made a bolting dash toward their treehouse, giggling insanely and taking with them all the answers to the curiosity and grudgery they had created over town. No, he was the Pumpkin King, he knew all of the tricks in the book, and he wasn't intending to fall for something so simple. He relished in their horrified, hidden glances to one another; they had just fully realised that to obtain their promised and saught-after reward they must first give to recieve, something they had always managed to cheat their way out of doing until now. The thought repulsed them. Their own game had been turned around....  
  
"Jack.... you stink," Shock muttered grudgingly, unwillingly accepting her temporary defeat as she folded her arms tightly across her chest and lowered her eyeline to the worn floorboards below her. Jack laughed, standing to his full height once more.  
  
"I'm sure I do. But on a more serious note, they'll probably ask some interesting and rather interrogating questions. You only have to answer what you want, though, don't feel pressured. The whole purpose of this excercise is to get them to understand you just a little more than they already do, and perhaps vice versa. If you're polite and compliant, you'll get your candy after everyone is gone. Trust me." All three shot a vehemious, poison glance in his direction; he merely laughed. "Don't look at me like that, you agreed to do this in the first place."  
  
"Yeah, that was before we realised how much of a do-gooder you really are," Barrel muttered beneath his breath. The trio stifled their insane giggles. Jack smiled and slowly turned away. He had heard Barrel's little joke, but decided against retaliating. He was in too good of a mood to mess up now.  
  
*  
  
After what seemed like a lifetime to the gossiping audience, their Pumpkin King turned toward them, holding out his hands before him to signify that he required full silence to speak. Once again, the whispers slowly tapered into silence.  
  
"Once again, I ask you to be polite. And refrain from bombarding them with a hundred questions at once, wait your turn. And you three," he turned to face the trio onstage, whom of which had been whispering between one another and had turned vaguelly to face their Pumpkin King. He shot them the sternest look he could muster. "You're to tell the truth. No lies, no tall tales, no sarcasm-"  
  
"No candy," Shock muttered to the boys as Jack continued his stern speech. They rolled their eyes and nodded in a small, defeated agreement. They didn't have anything to get them out of the jam they found themself in, not even Lock's back-up diversion plan, which was now confiscasted, deep in the pockets of one of the two burly guards standing stiffly by the exit door. By the time they rather dully and reluctantly accepted they had no way of escaping, and realising with a pained reality, that if they lied or stretched the truth a little to make it more interesting, they wouldn't recieve the candy, Jack had long finished his rounds and had taked refuse a little further backstage, scanning the crowd for particularly desperate eyes, for someone with the hungry look of curiosity and the twice as hungry need to quench it. His eyes finally settled on merely one person that failed to hold a look of grudgery blended callously into their curiosity. Sally.  
  
"Sally, did you have something that you wanted to say?" Jack asked quietly, on the boundary of tenderness. Sally tore her insistant gaze from the trio and fixed it onto Jack, smiling greatfully. It had been then that the whispering began once more. Suspicious and spite-filled whispering, more often than not circulating from the groups of older female witches. Overcome with the embarrassment of the entire town watching her with hawks' eyes and the vague, suspicious whispering ("Of course he'd pick Sally first. She's his little ragdoll now...", "Haven't you heared? Those two have something together, if you get my drift.", "I heared she's stayed at Jack's house overnight, that little ragdoll hussy. I betcha she wasn't just baking muffins for him...") she lowered her already introverted gaze, blushing profusively.  
  
"No Jack, it's nothing," her voice was faint and thready, and barely surpassed a whisper as she, like Shock had done before her, studied the floor beneath her booted foot with a mock curiosity. Lock tutted impatiently, turning to the ragdoll with arms crossed and his foot tapping callously against the cold wooden floorboards beneath him.  
  
"Look lady, we don't got all night here. Are you gonna ask us one of your interrogating questions or are ya just gonna sit there and blush while everyone makes fun of you and Jack and our time is completely wasted?" his cohorts giggled slightly at his impatient retort, the ragdoll blushed an even more violent crimson. Yet the crowd abruptly ceased their harsh whisperings as they realised that even the trio onstage had heard quite well what they had been conversing between eachother. Nervous eyes turned to a stern and unamused looking Jack. They hoped he hadn't heard too much.  
  
"Well...I-I was just wondering if you three were born here, in Halloween town," Sally spoke, oddly defiant to Lock and the crowd as she replied. All gazes in the room locked onto the trio, who had, in turn, turned to eachother, their faces spelling disbelievement of the pure irony in Sally's innocent question. Their faces lit up with mischievious grins as they realised an embarrassment was in order.  
  
"Sally, Sally, Sally. I thought you would have remembered, of all people, when we first came to Halloween Town..." Shock grinned, placing her hands innocently behind her back and winking to her comrades, winking to comply with her plans. Sally cocked her head slightly to one side, she had naught a clue what the little rascals were grinning so insanely about.  
  
"But that must have been way back when you were first created, though, wasn't it Sally?" Barrel added, a mischievious grin spread like spilled tea across his face. Sally wrinkled her brow, closing her eyes in the thoughful, anticipated silence.  
  
"What? I.... I don't-" she muttered, raising a hand to her forehead and hastily pushing away a small strand of deep red hair. The raging blush had now returned, strong and true, to her cheeks. She knew what they were grinning so insanely about now. She knew the story they had in store.... and that they were intending to embarrass her senseless before a crowd that were already on a certain platform of dislike for her. Lock pushed Barrel uncurtiously to one side, dominating the conversation in his usual fashion.  
  
"Nah, she probably wouldn't remember, guys. She was pretty dumb back then- she didn't even know how to read properly yet. But we do owe her a lot...A whole lot..." he trailed off, grinning, turning to his accomplices. The entire hall seemed to shift their insistant gaze to the ragdoll in an unleashed curiosity. What were the little pipsqueaks talking about? Did she know?  
  
"Well of course we do, Lock," Shock eyed Sally, reading the unnerved look on her face like a book. She was an extremely manipulative little girl. She had learned how to use ones emotions to her advantage; Oogie Boogie had always said it was one of her redeeming qualities when he was still around. She quickly turned to Jack too, whose stern frown had now become a faint, if not unleashed curiosity as he leaned warily against the podium that had been placed carefully sidestage. He wasn't going to stop them, he was just as curious as everyone else. He didn't know this story; neither did anyone else in the room... except, of course, for Sally. She smiled and breathed deeply. "She was the person that introduced us to Oogie Boogie in the first place."  
  
A gasp rippled across the crowd and they sat, rooted to their spot in anxious silence, waiting for the trio to continue.....  
*************  
  
A/N- Yeah, I think I'll stop there. Please review. I enjoy reviews. 


	2. Tombstones and Stitches

A/N- I'm back, I guess. New chapter. Sorry this took so long. I just got a new job and, seeing as it's so near christmas, they've been working me for all I have. I've also had exams and other assorted crapness such as severe thunderstorms that flooded my house and heatwaves that have put us on big water restrictions to deal with. Consider this my Christmas present to you all.  
  
Please note that this chapter has a lot of switching from them 'telling' the story to the story actually taking place. I'm sure you'll work it out, but if not, use the stars as your wonderful guideline ^_^ Thankyou so much for finding the time to read, and please review!  
  
Umm, also, I've found that my Beta Reading Clientele has hit a bit of a low. I just want to say that I'm a hard-working Beta reader looking for a bit more work to fill up her boring life between studying and watching random cartoons. If you're interested (I Beta for all genres and shows. Anything you can throw at me won't put me off, after what I've seen nothing can surprise me ^_^), drop me an e-mail me at unravelled_stitching@hotmail.com, or leave a review with a valid e-mail I can contact you with. Tenx  
  
-The artist formerly known as Ruri Unstitched.  
  
* * * * * * * * * * * * *   
  
Never, in all of his long, ceaseless years as the Pumpkin King, had Jack ever had the chance to witness the Town Hall filled to the brim yet so insanely, unbearably silent as it was at that very moment. Silence was not usually a word that associated comfortably with the Halloween folk or their rather eccentric and abnormal customs, and to see the hall so devoid of their proverbial lifeblood was almost too much for the his skull to absorb.   
  
The attentive faces of row after overcrowded row of nightmarish ghouls and goblins stood to attention in frozen, awed silence. It was as if the very fabric of time had been stopped; paused to the nanosecond. Curiosity was not a rare and ancient find in the Hall that night. For every one of the creatures sported more than enough in their features; in their eyes (if of course they owned a pair.) Though ultimately, there was one figure in the hall that did not bare the uniform gaze of perplexed bemusement and curiosity on her face, and for very good reason at that. Even a fully grown adult as she was, she was only slightly older than the little terrors onstage, and not nearly as cunning and witty as they had grown accustomed to being. In a physical match they would slaughter her hands down, and she knew all would be the same for the impending verbal assault at hand.  
  
She cursed inwardly, forcefully and unstopping, at herself. How could she have been so stupid?! How could she, of all the questions she could have possibly asked, bring up the sole issue the little terrors had against her, the one thing they could sabotage and blackmail her horribly with? Was she completely insane? Or were the little trio right; was she just stupid? At that moment, Sally felt nothing but weakness; complete and utter powerlessness. She had made an awful mistake, and she felt in the very pit of her non-existant gut that she would pay for it that night, in front of all those people, at the mercy of three little troublemakers she had only been trying so hard to be nice to on the awful night in question. She shuddered in a long, gulping breath; turning her gaze downward to her recently shined boots. It was going to be a long night.  
  
"Before ya even begin, ya little monsters, how do we know ya ain't jus' gunna lie to us like ya always do?" A small and grotesque demon that lacked both intelligence and constructive vocabulary protested strongly from his well-earned seat in the middle rows. "Ya'll is Boogieses' Boys! Ya got quite a track record fer lyin'." A small, whispered agreement circulated the room in small arcs. The trio giggled viciously, mocking the demon's harshly spoken words of suspicion, causing him to cross his arms and screw his eyes in distaste.  
  
"Oh boo-hoo!" Shock cried sardonically in the cynical squeak of a voice the townspeople had come to greatly despise. "If you thought we were gonna lie all night, then why did so many people even bother showing up?" The crowd, having angrily opened their mouths to strongly protest this remark found, to their dismay, that they had naught a witty comeback nor sarcastic sentence to throw back to the girl. It was very true; why had they come?  
  
"Besides," Lock took a few bounding steps foward, pushing his comrade rather ungracefully to one side of the stage (to her utter displeasure.) His tail had begun to slide beneath the hem of his shirt now; whipping at a slow, menacing speed from side to side in a rhythymic, agressive and hypnotising pattern. Anyone who had witnessed the boy first hand in one of the many mischievious and daily rampages he participated in would have immediately recognised the movement as that of smug and sneering annoyance; a sign to be very wary, a sign to be afraid. "I don't think Jack's heard this one before.... I'm sure it would be a wonderful surprise for him especially, considering him and Sally's little..." his eyes flickered briefly to his Pumpkin King, his unseen eyebrow had slightly upturned as he leaned, forgotten, against the back podium. "Err... arrangement." His voice had grown obnoxiously haughty as he shot the profusively blushing Sally a mocking, telltale grin. A small whisper rippled across the crowd, sneering traces of jealousy in bitter discourse studding the room like brightly coloured christmas lights.  
  
"I don't think you should go on," Jack spoke up sternly from his previously unbeknownst placement, taking a firm step foward, arms crossed in disapproval. Loud tuts and wails of rebellion sliced across the room from the most curious of the souls present. He knew very well that whatever they had planned in their twisted little minds, whether it was true or not, whether it was just a silly game of rebellious payback to himself for not allowing them to have their candy first, whatever it was could not be that of anything pleasant. They had never played that game, neither did he expect them to in the first place. He thought it best to stop the madness before it grew too far out of hand for him to handle alone. Yet in the depths of his skull, far from the part controlling all sense of rationality and defense, just as it had countless times in his past, an odd and surreal sense of curiosity had latched tightly onto his brain, gnawing and tearing away like a bloodsucking lice, ordering him to allow the trio to continue. What was it that Sally had done that was so bad? how could she have done something so serious as to introduce three small children to the most ultimate and absolute evil Halloween Town had ever had to deal with? He had to know....   
  
He damned his curiosity, just as he had countless and bountiful times before. It was the sole emotion refraining him from immediately ordering the tiny trio to cease their story, hand them their sugary bribe and let them be on their way; taking with them the immense hatred and bias that constantly surrounded their being, yet also taking with them the impending embarrassment and shame that he was sure they were to bombard Sally with at any moment.  
  
"Ah, Jack! Stop worrying. We're not gonna upset your little girlfriend-" Lock retorted in a voice stuffed to bursting with mock sincerity to Jack's undecided words, arms folded defiant and smug behind the crook of his back. Jack could almost be certain, with a deathly suspicion, that the middle and index finger on both of his vaguelly translucent hands were crossed tightly over one another. "Besides, betcha she's never told you this one..."  
  
Jack turned to Sally; her eyeline was fixed intently to the floor, lip quivering in a nervous and utterly hopeless twitch and her face denude of calm. It was obvious that whatever was about to be said was going to be hard for her, and perhaps even harder for others to accept. But the curiosity birthed from the situation was simply too immense for Jack to merely let be! It was something too large, something that could not simply be slid away beneath the bed or folded neatly to fit in the closet for another days use. If things like this didn't come out in the open to be disabled, they were a proverbial timebomb, just waiting to blow up in the beholders face.  
  
And so, with a head full of doubts and a heart that he was sure by the end of the night would be full to bursting with regrets, he turned to the trio and let out a tiny, sincere nod. A sign that he gave them his approval to continue. In her seat, Sally groaned inwardly, and on the stage three children grinned very openly as their payback began.  
  
* *  
  
"I think it all began when we died."  
  
"When we died? No, no! It was after we died, moron!"  
  
"As if you can tell the difference, Witchyface! It was all the same thing at the time. Like falling asleep and waking up again," Barrel retorted, voice dripping with sarcasm as he threw an offensive hand motion in her general direction, which was viciously matched and bettered by his female counterpart.  
  
"He's right, Shock, It really was all the same thing," Lock reasoned, folding his arms tightly before his chest. The girl's eyes rolled painfully in their sockets, an intense urge to hit both boys as hard as she possibly could washed over her briefly. Though in a perspective, she could understand where their words were drifting from. She had never really been able to tell the exact moment that she had switched from dying to being dead, and it was a topic that she often found herself pondering about when there was simply nothing else to think; about how she could of died, and how it had felt when it had happened. But there had been no feeling, no sensation attatched to the event. Nothing that her mind had thought memorable enough to store in it's infinate thought banks. The closest she had come to ever being able to describe the non-existant feeling was that she had blinked, and in that nanosecond everything she had ever known and all the skills she had ever aquired from life had quite simply evaporated into the air, and dying was... in a way, like being born again, waking from a deep sleep, having to start at the start, having to learn and develop in a new, unfamiliar world. It had scared her back then, something she had never thought humanly possible. But now that time seemed too far behind her to be afraid of, and she understood that she was right in some aspects back then; it wasn't humanly possible... as after death, they were no longer humans.   
  
* * * * *  
  
"Unghh.......Ahhow.."   
  
The girl, having slowly swam into conciousness, had initially groaned softly from the sharp bubbling, nauseated feeling eminating from the very pits of her stomach. Yet the second the sound protruded from her mouth she found reason enough to groan a second time. The sound of her own aching moan, barely a decibal above a whisper, was enough to make her brain explode with a sharp, pounding ache from her temples to the very back of her skull. A hand flew to her head shakily, massaging the delicate, throbbing skin about her eyes and forehead, furrowing her brow tightly against the pain. It took a large amount of effort to be able to think clearly; almost as if her mind, still inky dark from the fading unconciousness, had been invaded callously by a thick, foggy mist; making it almost impossible to shine anything through. But one thought had managed to slip its way through the fog, making itself known both in the back of her mind and on the very tip of her tongue. What happened?  
  
"You awake?" a voice she immediately recognised, obnoxiously loud in her sensitive ears, very suddenly invaded the sanity of her already scrambled mind. She immediately cried out as the sound rang painfully through her already throbbing brain, smashing into it as though it were a steel sledgehammer. Her brow furrowed deeper as her hand quickly slid over her ringing ears.  
  
"Would you keep it down, moron! I have a headache the size of your grandma here..." she moaned softly through tightly gritted teeth. A slight tutting from the voice she recognised well sounded above her.  
  
"Yeah, well no wonder! Your brain probably stopped working in the time you've been sleeping. You've been at it like a log in the damn land of Nod," the voice retorted sardonically in a tone only slightly softer than the one he had used previously. The girl snorted, sluggishly pulling herself into a seated position, rubbing her lead-filled eyelids.  
  
"Well at least sleeping is the only thing I...I..." though the girl never had the chance finished her sentence as she agonisingly slowly pulled her eyelids open, turning to the boy she knew was talking. Though when she had turned to him, her eyes had been invaded by a sight that was most certainly not the person she had expected to see before her. She gasped, ignoring her pounding head that screamed, begged for her to stay still and jumped from the hard stone plateau she seemed to have been lying apon with a quick, catlike agility.  
  
The boy- or what seemed to be the general shape of a boy- rolled his eyes painfully, holding his hands in the air as if to represent a truce. She shrunk deeper into the dim shadows of what she now saw was a small, claustrophobic room the two inhibited. Her head ached, yet she persisted.  
  
"Not you too," the boy moaned, placing a hand to his forehead. "I know, I know, it's a change. I dunno why, but we've all changed." His voice lingered slightly before it upruptly returned. "I dunno about you, but I don't think I looks half bad, eh?" he ran a deathly pale hand through his dishevelled deep red hair, throwing an offbeat wink in her general direction. Her tense body slackened immensely at the words and the breath that had had found itself stuck tightly inside her lungs slowly released. Though it didn't look at all like the person it sounded so familiar to, like her friend of years and years, she didn't need his looks to pick his personality immediately. She didn't know what had happened to him, or what kind of joke he thought he was pulling on her, but she knew it was indeed him.  
  
"You scared me," she muttered, pulling herself from the shadows and once again into the dim waning moonlight that washed weakly across the small room's walls in one small strip. The boy laughed sarcastically, taking a step closer.  
  
"I thought nothing scared you."  
  
"Shut up," she retorted darkly as she took a few steps in the direction of the small stone pleateau, examining it carefully through eyes sharp for detail. There was small, curvaceous writing that seemed to be carefully carved into the coarse stone, yet in the sparse light her eyes could not make out the tiny, incomprehensible words. "Just where the heck are we? And why are you dressed up in that goofy Halloween costume?" The boy twitched nonchalantly at her question.  
  
"It's not a costume, I can't get it off," he shrugged. "Can't you remember anything about what happened?"  
  
"No," she scoffed slightly, turning away from the stony scrawl. "Something happened?"  
  
"Did you wake up with a sore stomach too?" She nodded, and he then nodded wisely. "I can only just remember it... Halloween... and we finally got candy from that senile old hag Mrs O'Leary..." he struggled immensely with the thought, small and fragmented, that had embedded itself in his brain like shattered glass. "But that candy she gave us.... it was... bad." Shock, though she could not remember the time Lock was attempting quite immensely to explain, could feel it, and she understood without needing to recall. There had been something wrong, something not quite perfect; her bubbling, still aching stomach viciously confirmed that.  
  
There was an awkward silence between the two as they pondered, searched hard and deep in their memory banks for something, anything that would be able to confirm what their hearts (and stomachs) told them so very plainly. Yet both came up for proverbial air empty. The subject was immediately changed.  
  
"So what the heck is this place?" her voice was hard and stony once more as she turned every which way, slightly baffled. Her male friend shrugged nonchalantly.  
  
"Well, right now we're in your crypt. Other than that, I have no idea."  
  
"Oh hah hah," she replied sarcastically, throwing a sour look in his general direction. He grinned innocently.  
  
"Well I'm guessing it's yours anyway, it has your nickname on it..."  
  
"Seriously Lock," she referred to his long-lived nickname, "couldn't you think of anything better than that to freak me out? If not, you're really losing your touch..."  
  
"No really," he protested, pointing vaguelly to the sole distribution of light in the tiny room; a small crack in what seemed like a door to his left side. "We really are in a crypt, and it really does have your name on it. I have one too, and so does Barrel. See for yourself." The girl tutted, annoyed and unconvinced, yet nevertheless sauntered to the light, all the while lecturing her assailant on his failing trickster skills. The heavy slab of stone being used as a surrogate door had been pushed far enough to one side to allow her to squeeze though, although it was an extremely tight fit. Though it was only the wane moonlight shining, it stung her eyes as she squeezed with much difficulty into the outside world, her friend not far behind her. She turned sharply in the dust and dead leaves that littered the ground beneath her feet, facing back to the impossibly small room she seemed to have been re-birthed from. He was right, it was a crypt, albeit a very crudely constructed one. The stone of it's walls shined ice-grey in the moonlight, coarse and hard. The construction of the room was both horribly lopsided and distorted, as if peering at it with her eyes squinted or through broken glass, at the same time.   
  
Yet it wasn't the room that attracted her attention so avidly, caused her to abruptly cease her inane lecturing; it was the plaque that hung carelessly above the small, lopsided entranceway. Carved in what looked like a severely burned and decaying wood plank, a small R.I.P sat in distorted lettering almost incomprehensible to her eyes. Chipped deeply beneath these letters, as if it had been hacked away at the wood with a blunt butter knife, five letters sat very plainly. An S, a H, an O, a C and a K, looking as though they had been seated through countless elements for hundreds of years sat apon the decaying board. It announced boldly to anyone there to see that the crypt, in the form of her well-used nickname Shock, indeed belonged to her. Her eyes shifted slightly to the left. Another crypt sat obediently by her own, looking identical in every way bar the minute difference of the plaque that hung duly above the doorway, which instead read 'R.I.P LOCK.' in it's blunt-knived scrawl. The crypt to the right read 'BARREL'. Rest in Peace? The words caught in her throat as she realised that, in order to rest in peace, you must first be dead. Or on sleeping pills. And she knew most certainly she wasn't on those.  
  
A long, low cry of sheer disbelievement welled deep inside her throat.  
  
* * * * *  
  
"Ahaha, Shock was actually scared of something!" Barrel laughed, playfully pushing at his female assailant's shoulder. She shot a vehemious glare in return.  
  
"I wouldn't get too cocky, porky," she sneered, "Lock told me that the second you woke up you squealed like a baby and fainted dead on the spot."  
  
"I did not faint!" Barrel retorted, his cheek colour deepening a shade. "Anyone would think dying is an easy job. I was tired."  
  
"You did too faint! Admit it, you were scared silly!"  
  
"Was not!"  
  
"Was too!"  
  
"Shut up!" Lock cried very suddenly, his highly-strung, chalky discourse immediately overpowering anything his comrades could muster from their own throats. They shot one another a passing tongue-poke behind his turned back, before grudgingly allowing their partner to continue for fear of being pummeled and their share of the reward candy being taken when they returned home.  
  
"The point is, it was something new. Something we had never seen when we were alive," his voice became low, almost took on a hint of softness around the razor-sharp edges with an awed, surreal sense of wonder. It was something that Lock had simply never done. But just as the audience began to register this fact, register that there was something softer, something more curious caught in the vocals and mannerisms of a little boy they'd solely seen as trouble, it was gone as swiftly as it had appeared and the scathing, trouble-filled voice returned. "I mean, it isn't everyday you die and then wake up to find out you really are very much alive..."  
  
* * * * *  
  
"Ugh, don't you go fainting on me too..." the boy called in an unamused, nonchalant voice, leaning heavily against the stone exit door and crossing his arms firmly over his red-clad chest. "Barrel already did that. Took one look at his crypt and fainted dead on the spot..."  
  
"Dead?" Shock muttered beneath her breath, looking downward to her now repulsed, outstretched hands. They seemed different to her somehow, detatched. A different colour, perhaps? a different shape? She couldn't tell in the waning moonlight.  
  
"We can't be dead. We wouldn't be so alive," the boy replied thoughtfully to her whispered word, slackening his tight grip on himself and taking a small, shuffled step foward. The girl was slightly shaken about the situation at hand. He didn't fully understand himself why he hadn't panicked like she was when he'd awoken, in the dark, without the comfort of anyone's voice inside his own inky black tomb. But he hadn't, and he didn't intend to begin at that moment. He'd heard about delayed reactions, and he intended to take full benefit from it. With his two comrades heavily shaken, he was in charge.  
  
"We wouldn't have TOMBSONES if we weren't DEAD, Lock!" She cried, shaking her head furiously, her voice quavering violently in her throat  
  
"We have tombs, actually. Those ones are tombstones," the boy replied innocently, pointing in the general direction of a largely constructed stone crucifix located a mere few feet behind her. She yelled, and took a panicked step away from the intimidating monstrosity, marked crudely with the name 'Doctor' in its heavy grey stone. As she turned her gaze slightly she could see many more like it studding the lightly rolling landscape around them like beacons in the night. Were they in a.... a graveyard? "Personally, I like the tombs better. You think waking up in a little badly-made house is scary, imagine waking up six feet under."  
  
"Thankyou, Lock," she cried in a sardonic yet anxious sneer. "Thankyou very much. I'll sleep peacefully in my COLD STONE TOMB to know that, Moron!" She gave him a sharp, violent push in the shoulders to accentuate her point. He huffed indignantly. "I dunno how you can possibly be so calm in this situation!" her voice was shaking in an unnatural manner, as though of someone as far from calm as the body would allow. "Just look at us, Lock! We're hideous!"  
  
"Hey!" he cried, clearly offended. "Speak for yourself, Witchiepoo. I'm just as gorgeous as I ever was." He struck a pose. Seeing her old friend act just as arrogent and pig-headed as he ever did calmed her slightly, yet did not subdue the bubbling and growing discomfort in her stomach and throat.  
  
"Hey! Witchiepoo?.... Is it that bad...?" She touched her arm offhandedly, a small, lopsided grin forming on her face. He turned from his preoccupied swimsuit model pose, looked her up and down once and grinned.  
  
"Well, you look about a million times better that Barrel, but let's just say we might hold off on getting you a mirror for a little while. We don't want you having a fatal cardiac arrest."  
  
"You can only die once, you know," was her swift and simple reply.  
  
* * * * *   
  
"When we got here, and had dealt with the fact that we were... well... dead, we weren't too sure what we were supposed to do," Lock murmered, shrugging his shoulders to add to the overall effect of his sentence. "I mean, we looked different," he cracked his tail as if it were a whip. A few members of the audience jumped slightly in their seats at the loud, sudden noise. "And so did everything else."  
  
"And just when we were looking completely lost and hopeless," Barrel added breathlessly, becoming rather excited that their story's point was fast approaching. Lock added a small 'speak for yourself' beneath his breath, poking his tongue duly at his male comrade, whom of which immediately returned the motion.  
  
"Who should turn up but sweet little Sally." Almost immediately, as if somebody had thrown a large and powerful switch, every gaze in the room shifted from Shock's wiry, unclean little frame to Sally, whom of which had her tremoring hands buried deep in her lap and a small, discontent frown present on her face. It was as if not a soul dared to make a sound, to even breathe, for fear of missing the preceeding part of the story unfurling before their attentive ears.  
  
"You have to admit, though, back then she wasn't like she is now..." Barrel added thoughtfully, tapping a pudgy finger to his chin, head cocked slightly as he briskly searched his memory of the night for the right words to fully explain his thoughts. "She was really... weird. Like she had... no brain at all."  
  
"Yeah, she kept falling over. And laughing a lot."  
  
"She couldn't speak very good either..."  
  
"And she took a shining to Lock, of all people. Anyone that does that must be out of their minds," Shock added, rolling her eyes in an overly dramatic fashion as she recalled the shy, polite tones of a scratchy, unused voice Sally had administered when conversing with the little red demon in that long time ago. A small groan of bitter dismay sounded from the front row of the crowd, between two rather unkempt and awed-looking demons. From Sally, whom of which had bent over, head in hands, internally begging that the floor would suddenly, inexplicably swallow her whole, if only to escape the childrens' words.  
  
* * * * *   
  
"So...." Shock turned three hundred and sixty five degrees in a sarcastic wonder. "If we're so dead, d'you have any idea where this place is supposed to be?"  
  
"Nope, but it must be an obsessive horror movie lover's paradise." Despite still being slightly nervous and on-edge, she giggled slightly at her friend's words.   
  
"Well, if you really wanna know... this is Halloween Town," a small matter-of-fact and slightly out of tune voice, one neither Shock nor Lock had ever heard in their lifetimes called through the night. They turned, searching suspiciously through the waning dark to locate the origin of the small female voice. There was a rustle and a slight creaking eminating from a place close to their pricked ears, before an overshadowed figure appeared. The moonlight raked over her features, catching on the dark, bold stitching that seemed so evident on her face, neck and arms. Lock raised an eyebrow with interest; Shock merely glared with suspicion.  
  
"Halloween? Halloween Town?" He replied to the figures words, his eyes dragging over the stitching with slight awe. She seemed to nod enthusiastically, clasping her hands to her chest and taking another unbalanced, tentative step foward.  
  
"That's what the doctor told me anyways," she replied nonchalantly, turning her curious gaze away from the duo as it caught on anything that seemed to move even slightly in the bitter autumn breeze. She brought a small hand to her face, brushing at a strand of dark hair that the wind had blown playfully onto her facial features. "He made me, you know. All by himself."  
  
"Have you been spying on us?" Shock eyed the woman cautiously, throwing a bitter glare in her general direction. The woman laughed loudly and carelessly, attempting to take a step foward, yet falling clumsily to her knees in the process.   
  
"No, no. I was just walking. It's such a pretty night, so I wanted to come out.... but the Doctor wouldn't take me. 'Not today', he said, 'perhaps tomorrow Sally'," she innocently imitated a much lower, gruffer voice with her own throat, eyes shining as she placed her hands carefully on her kneecaps. She ran a finger curiously along a particularly precarious line of stitching. "But I didn't wanna go out tomorrow; tonight is so lovely but it might not be here when tomorrow comes. So I came out without him." She sighed dissmissively, struggling to push her already fully developed body into a standing position. She seemed shaky on her legs, unbalanced, as if she were only just beginning the slow and tedious learning process of walking. The children turned to one another, a slight shrugging of shoulders and raised eyebrows were exchanged silently before they turned back to the woman, who seemed to be waving her hands shakily from side to side as if to prevent herself from toppling to the muddy ground a second time.  
  
"So tell me, Sally," Lock replied in an over flattering manner, placing a pale hand to his chin as he vaguelly recalled the name she had placed to herself previously. The woman now turned her full attention toward him, the smile flooding her face seeming to be that of both pure innocence and obedience; as of a newly-trained puppy. "You say that this graveyard is in a place called Halloween Town."  
  
"Yes, sir, the one and only," Sally replied. The sole thing that the Doctor had taught her, apart from basic vocabulary notions and the seemingly neverending struggle to walk with poise and balance, was manners. Lock beamed as the visibly older woman replied as if he were her superior, most likely for the lack of knowing any better.  
  
"And what exactly is this Halloween Town?"  
  
"Well, I think it's stupid, actually," Sally haughtily began, touching her upper arm lightly with the opposite hand, "going to all that fuss to scare little human children silly on one night of the whole year! I think it'd be so much easier to be nice and kind and-"  
  
"Did you hear that? Halloween Town IS Halloween!" Lock whispered with an extatic enthusiasm through Sally's droning, unable to keep the extreme elation coursing through his veins at bay. Shock, though, took a tediously long time to nod in agreement. "T-This is too good to be true! I mean....I mean this is gotta be something we dreamed about every single day of our lives!"  
  
"Exactly, moron, our LIVES! I dunno how, but we've... we've given up our own lives....for this?" Shock thrust her hand furiously in the direction of the childish ragdoll, whom of which had stopped talking abruptly when she found a wilting, blackened flower protruding awkwardly from the overgrown grasses surrounding a headstone and was currently eyeing it curiously from every direction available.  
  
"Dont be stupid," he turned back to his comrade, shrugging. "We didn't give up our lives, we would have died anyway. This is just a.... a bonus level."  
  
"There are no bonus levels in life, Lock," she replied slowly, almost painfully. Her mouth pulled into an unhappy frown. "In case you didn't realise, we never got instruction manuals or a twelve month warranty.... it's not one big game."  
  
"But come on! We're talking permanent costumes here!" He cried, rubbing a modest hand down the chest of his scarlet jumpsuit.  
  
"We don't know anyone here.... except for her," his small assailant replied indignantly, folding her hands stubbornly over her slender chest and jabbing an accusing finger at the ragdoll who was now attempting to create a song about the flower she had just picked- to no avail.  
  
"Trick or Treating.... something we do best!"  
  
"We're DEAD!"  
  
"No more bossy, annoying adults!"  
  
"Well if they're all like her, we'll never survive!" Sally, having quickly lost interest to the snapping flower, downcast her eyes at the pointed yelling. The words they were using were simply too difficult for her to decipher, but to Sally their tone seemed that of tense anger... something she despised with a passion. Gently and carefully she pulled herself to her feet, swaying slightly to find her centre of gravity. She took a tentative step foward, rubbing her shoulder heavily in deep, purposeful thought. There had to be something she could say to stop their increasingly louder brawl.  
  
"My house is up on the hill," her small, thready voice, though nothing to their booming ruckus, cut through the commotion with a smug sense of pride. The woman pointed vaguelly to the rickety remains of an observatory at the very peak of one of the many rolling hills that spread themselves throughout the landscape. "Where's your house? Can we go there now?"  
  
"We got nothin' but a crypt with our names on it, lady. So if you don't mind, I'm going back to my cold stone tomb to die now." Shock, filled to the brim with sarcasm and incompliance shot at the ragdoll lady, turning in a mock huff to storm away with a slight 'Oh wait, I can't even do that, I'm already dead!'. A strong hand latching tightly into her collarbone stopped the little would-be witch dead in her tracks.  
  
"Excuse my friend. She's an idiot." A tight and rather painful squeeze supressed any retaliation the girl may have given to the comment. She growled vehemiously, yet stayed where she was nonetheless. "We haven't got a house yet, but maybe you might know of one? Just a place we can stay until Shock here stops being such a whiner and my other friend stops being such a baby?" Sally giggled childishly at the tone of his voice; drenched and sugar-coated in politeness and flattery.   
  
At that moment the sole thing that Sally felt she was obliged to accomplish was to please this little boy. This... This.... She studied him carefully. He was wearing a deep scarlet red and a long, twisting tail protruded from the seat of his pants (And was, in fact, wrapped around the girl in the witches hat's throat, having she provoked a fist fight in retaliation to his previous statement). This demon. He looked like a demon to her. She wanted to please this demon. Her mouth twisted into a content yet lopsided little grin, pulling at the fresh stitches that tightly held her mouth into place. She had figured it out all by herself, without the Doctor's help this time. The demon had been awfully nice to her and it seemed, to her simple yet innocent mind, that one good turn really did deserve another. But where did she know of a place they could stay?   
  
* * * * *  
  
"Sorry Sally, but you were kinda... well... stupid back then." Lock shrugged, holding a smirk of sheer superiority and smug satisfaction tightly latched onto his face. Sally, between the two burly demons in the front row, shook her head slowly in utter dismay.  
  
"Yeah, anyone that takes a shining to Lock of all people must be mentally defective," Shock added in a sniping fashion, joining Barrel in a small giggle as a grimace of annoyance flashed across their unspoken leader's face. He shot them a stare of pure poison and slowly but surely the giggles wasted away to nothing and Lock, once again, turned to the agaped crowd.  
  
"Well, regardless of whether she was mentally defective or not," he shot his friends a pointed glare, "Sally made the worst mistake here...." Lock continued, blissfully unaware that his comrades were foolishly pulling horrid faces behind his turned back. "This is where our story really gets really interesting, and what you've all been waiting for...."  
  
* * * * *  
  
A/N- Sorry, I know, I always end the chapters in cliff hangers, it's just my style of writing. I apologise for this chapter being a little boring.... I had to set the scene. It actually did have more in it but it was becoming too long, so I just cut it here. New chapter should be out very soon, as I'd already written half of it to go with this one. Thanks for taking the time to read.  
  
Reviews, please! 


	3. Treehouses and Gratitude's

A/N- New chapter... Yay. This is probably the bit you've all been waiting for, as this really brings the story together. This may or may not be the last chapter in the story, depending on what I feel like and how long this becomes; I mean I love to bring out long chapters, but not ridiculously long ^_^. Special thanks to these people, who have reviewed my story thus far; IwillmarryJustinTimberlake, LoKi-Shiver, Nightmare1, Sanely Challenged, Leona-da-Quirm, ASGT, Hannah Clark, Cryptic Ragdoll, LadySherlock93, Gloria Patri, Locked and last but definitely not least, Ninkira. Thanks guys, and everyone else please take the time to both check out these fantastic peoples' fics and review on this one, it takes about 30 seconds and it makes me a very very happy person. Now, on with da fun.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Sally had never wanted to be the very epicenter of all attention to any one person, let alone the entire population of Halloween Town all at once. She had always been very content to live in the background, to be a mere stitch in the fabric of afterlife and nothing more, to allow others go about their lives while she, unseen, scurried about her own. It seemed almost too painful for her to bare when anyone even slightly noted her presence on the street as she quietly passed; so to have every eye avidly turned in her direction, to be at the very center, the very core of the sole thing anyone seemed to be thinking at that moment (except perhaps Barrel, who was carelessly dreaming of what he was going to do with his third of the candy when the trio returned home) seemed to be from what her most terrible of nightmares were composed of.  
  
She knew very well that she could not stop the terrible little trio telling the last leg of the story that proceeded;it was too far gone for that. The wound had already been inflicted... the preceeds of the story were merely the knife jabbing a little deeper and twisting hard, as though to ensure the damage would take an age to heal. And she knew, with a sinking hopelessness in the pits of her artificial gut, that it would.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Sally's brow furrowed deeply in concentration. The little red demon boy had specifically requested her help to think of a place he and his friends could stay, and she intended to please him greatly. But she hadn't really seen all of Halloween Town yet, and nowhere immediately sprung to her simple mind. The Doctor had said she wasn't ready for the excitement of most of the other and seemingly infinate places of her town that she'd never laid eyes apon. From her bedroom window she could take in many of them in the cold, hazy distance, and she internally knew for a fact that when she was older she would visit all of them without pause.  
  
"I know, I know! There's a house in the trees! A house in the trees just past the graveyard that I saw when I walked with Jack! Jack says no one lives there anymore, so you can stay, okay?" she cried very suddenly, even surprising herself as the words seemingly tumbled head over heels from her mouth. They cut sharply through the ruckus of the small brawl that had broken out behind her (Shock having become heavily insulted by Lock's previous comment in which he deemed her a "whiner"). The boy's tail slowly unravelled from it's constricting grip around the girls throat. She, in turn, reluctantly turned his leg loose from her painful death grip and slowly rose from being seated as heavily as she possibly could muster on his lower spine.  
  
"A house in the trees, huh? A treehouse," Lock lamented in a voice that just barely succeeding a whisper as a fleeting and utterly sinister grin rounded across his face. "Sounds perfect."  
  
"Oh no, I ain't sleeping in some rickety treehouse and.... and you can't make me!" Shock protested loudly, stomping her feet firmly into the ground and folding her hands stubbornly over her chest, unbelieving of what she had heard "I'd rather just stay here and waste away in my tomb, thankyou very much. End of Story!"  
  
* *  
  
In the time period that proceeded her harshly spoken protest, Shock found that she, to her utter disgust, would not recieve the last say in the matter as she had previously meditated. Barrel (whom of which had reluctantly been shaken awake, taken one look at the curious ragdoll peering into his face from a mere few inches away and fainted once more) had been awarded the gristly job of slinging the kicking, screaming and visibly heavier Shock over his heaving shoulders; much to his complete and utter disgust. In the meantime Lock, far in front of the struggling pair, calmly stepped in sync with the strange doll-woman, whom of which was travelling at the fastest pace her inexperienced and shaky legs would take her.   
  
Behind his new ghoulish façade and behind his newfound sarcasm and leadership, Lock was internally debating the issue at hand. How in the world did they end up in this place? Even though it was as fascinating and breathtaking as his mind could possibly comprehend, he couln't begin to imagine how in the world they had come to be there. Was Shock, for once in her life, babbling and whining for something she was actually correct about? Were they....dead? Though he couldn't logically see how that could possibly be. His parents, from a very young age, had instilled in him the strong sense of belief in heaven. If he was dead, wouldn't he have gone to that big land in the clouds they always talked about at churches and funerals... the one that everyone seemed both horrified yet strangely enamoured with? He wasn't a bad person at heart, but had he been bad enough in the years of trickery to be denied access to the ultimate and eternal resting place? Was this a level of Hell he'd found himself stuck in, punishment for all the jokes and tricks they'd played on their parents, the neighbours and every classmate they'd had for a matter of years? Was that it? Had they really been that bad...?  
  
"That's it! That's it!" Sally's extatic pitch cut through his heated thoughts with the velocity and strength of a sharp axe, immediately dispelling the thick fog of questions inside his mind that, to his terrible dismay, he could find not one answer for. He turned his face vaguelly in the direction of Sally's erratically waving arm. It was pointed (Slightly off-course he might add, yet he saw it's target nonetheless) toward a twisted and rather odd-looking tree, large and hollow with what little clumps of leaves that did remain stained a brilliant autumn orange. Though the tree itself bent and curved in odd yet elegant angles, covering much of it's foliage with blackened trunks, the Trio could just barely make out a small house teetering dangerously between them. It appeared oddly unproportioned, as if it were built by children supplied solely with planks of decaying wood, third-rate timber shop nails and a rusty, misused hammer. Shock, whom of which had been thrown to the ground in a rather undainty manner following the completion of the (to Barrel, at least) longest walk in the history of their lives, let out a small moan as she took in the site of the horribly disfigured yet cunningly built home.  
  
"Nobody lives in that house anymore. Maybe you can," Sally lamented quietly, raising an inquisitive finger to her chin in fragmented thought. A little troubled, she knew that there was something else Jack had told her about the house that she'd forgotten; something the Doctor had told her too in another of his tedious history of Halloween Town lessons. Unable to remember as she racked her brain with all her might, she assured herself that it couldn't possibly have been anything of importance. What could possibly be bad about a house in the trees? With a moat and a bridge and everything? It seemed to remind her in some ways of the enchanted castles in the basic picture books the Doctor had given her; she was, after all, just beginning to read. No, it couldn't possibly be anything bad.  
  
"A house? You couldn't even call that a house! If the big bad wolf was here right now, he wouldn't even have to start blowing to have that rickety thing fall down!" Shock cried, brushing furiously at her now dust-stained lilac clothing.  
  
"Big... bad what?" Sally replied, her eyes wide with a muffled confusion. Shock merely ignored the woman at all costs and, opening her mouth, she began a tediously long, furiously spoken speech which seemed to solely incude the fact that not even a pack of rabid, rabies-infected wolves (In which Sally had curiously asked what this 'Rabies Wolf' creature was) would get her up into that treehouse. Lock, however, had long shut out Shock's high-pitched whining and had turned his attention avidly toward the house. He agreed slightly with Shock, the place did look as though it would fall with the slightest motion, but they really didn't have much choice in the matter. It was either the treehouse before them or their tombs back in the eerie graveyard. He decided, with a small nod, that he'd much rather risk falling into the oblivion of that seemingly neverending moat and breaking his neck than spending a single night in his death domain.  
  
"This should do... at least until we get ourselves back together." Lock muttered between breaths to his male comrade, whom of which nodded slightly in return while rubbing his aching arms in a disgruntled manner. Sally's brow furrowed in confusion.  
  
"Back together? Are you broken?" she gingerly prodded Lock's red-clad forearm, swaying slightly off balance in the process. "The doctor can put you back together! he's good at fixing things." The demon-boy's eyes rolled painfully in their sockets as he shooed her fast-approaching hand away with a small, sharp swat of his own.  
  
"Forget it," he turned dissmissively from the ragdoll, who seemed too pre-occupied in attempting to find her centre of gravity again to notice the very obvious flashes of annoyance passing across the little boy's face like bolts of lightning. As the storm inside him cleared immensely, he found his mind beginning to formulate on it's own once more. It was all fine and dandy that they had located a place to stay, at least for the night; but what of the next morning? They knew nothing of this new and unfamiliar place, and it seemed the only grown up they had found didn't either. Did one need to eat when one was dead? If so, he wasn't sure how that was supposed to happen, or where they were supposed to locate anything mildly edible in a place that seemed to come straight from a horror movie set. Were all the adults in the place like her? His gaze shifted lightly to the ragdoll; her head cocked, mildly interested, as she avidly took in Shock very loudly 'expressing her personal opinion' (or as Lock and Barrel affectionately named it; 'Booting up Bossy-Mode'). He supposed she'd never seen anyone so loud and obnoxious; he knew he hadn't...  
  
"Lock, how're we supposed to get up there?" Barrel's low and slightly tentative voice callously invaded his personal thoughts. "There's no ladder or nothing." The demon-boy, a look of mild bemusement from the pure irony of the situation present on his face, studied the monstrosity carefully. His friend was right, there was no ladder to allow them up. There were no dints or crevices in the tree's jagged lines for small feet to latch onto, and it certainly wasn't low enough for them to jump and hope to catch hold of the low-built platform above.   
  
"Oh, that's just wonderful," Shock's sardonic voice pierced through his mental calculation like a hot poker. "Not only are we living in a house that looks like it'll fall just by looking at it but now, even if we were desperate enough to want to go up there, we're going to have to grow at least fifteen feet... or learn to fly."  
  
"Oh will you cut the complaining for once!" Lock, having become tired of his female assailant's seemingly neverending string of complaints wailed, turning and administering a sharp and extremely generalised push to her shoulder.   
  
Barrel, just tired of the girl in general (and recalling the fact every time he even slightly moved his aching limbs), replied with a "Yeah, shut up, witchy-girl!" and a swift shove in the opposite direction, much to her annoyance.  
  
"At least I'm the only one being practical here!" Shock's bitter reply came fast and without pause, pushing each boy in their consecutive shoulders. "You're both a bunch of morons. Lucky I died too, otherwise you'd probably end up killing yourselves."  
  
"I seen the vampires fly, it looks like fun!" Sally, eager for something to say between the snide remarks and violent shoving squealed, clearly overenthused. "Can I fly? I wanna fly!"  
  
* * * * *   
  
The crowd had been overcome with a tense silence. The faces had become ashen and surprised, lips pulled together into tight, grim lines and eyebrows raised high on their ghoulish brows. Nobody spoke; nobody dared to. They merely glared, pointed and vehemious, at the figure of whom they now envisioned as the very epicentre of their well-worn troubles with the terrible trio, the guilty culprit of all the problems they had ever experienced from them, and all of the tricks and surprises they were sure to experience in the near future. Sally, with the weight of a thousand outraged eyes heavy on her shoulders, tried with all of her strength to refrain the tears from springing to her own, yet found that the weight was seemingly too much to bare.  
  
"What were you thinking?!" A deep, lone voice cut through the silence of the crowd like a knife. The heads of the town turned vaguelly to the co-ordinates of which the voice had projected, though they proved more interested in keeping their gaze on the ragdoll's reaction to the words rather than to know to whom the voice belonged. "What were you thinking, showing them the treehouse? We'd all told you a thousand times the fate of the people that had lived there before! We'd told you about the trouble they'd given us! and you showed it to them anyway!!" Sally could not be sure who the icy voice belonged to, yet it stung sharply nonetheless.  
  
"I can't believe it," the flaky green witch with her high and chalky voice cried, clearly outraged as she stood on her seat in the middle rows. "I told you all she was trouble, didn't I?" Her spindly arms crossed over her chest knowingly, her mouth a thin, uniform line. "Jack, I told you she was trouble. I told you back on that Christmas-Halloween night that you were associating with.... with.." Her eyes met Jack's accusingly, as if he'd been a part of Sally's then-innocent plans. "With a girl from the scrap heap!" A seperate and very individual cry flew up from a hundred different mouths (including those of both Jack's and Sally's) in both agreement, protest and every view inbetween, causing a loud and unstoppable ruckus that, if there had been a singe soul in the town not attending the meeting, could have just as easily mistaken for a shattering earthquake.  
  
Through this terrible and inane babbling, nobody seemed to notice a certain Terrible Trio apon the stage, giggling fitfully as they watched the angry and disgruntled from a safe distance. The Town seemed to have forgotten who was telling the story they were so naively believing; the Terrible Trio the entire meeting was supposedly based on, the Terrible Trio whose inconspicuous silence had caused them to slide from the accusations in the town's heads; The Trio who had, slyly and completely un-noticed by the public eye, once again slipped their duties like a loosened noose and roped in another sacrifice for their cause.   
  
* * * * *  
  
After a seemingly endless string of heated deliberation, quick and impatient exploration and what seemed at the time like a neverending gush of facetious abuse from a certain unwilling female in the group, Lock was the one that managed to locate their one and only ticket upward into the poorly crafted treehouse. A simple rope and pulley system attatched to a worn wrought iron birdcage-turned-elevator was what he had uncovered just left of the threadbare bridge. The bottom of the cage was thin and worn, scattered with rust spreading like a disease about all of the basic mechanical meeting points. The pulleys were rough and squeaking, catching the slightly decaying rope in large bundles every so often, as though the pulley above their heads no longer had the strength to haul the awfully heavy cage upward. Although the method of transport to the freshly-dead trio seemed terribly risque, it also seemed as though it was their sole choice in the matter.  
  
Sally, who honestly believed she had never seen anything more wonderful her life, found herself instantly enamoured with the rope and steel contraption. After numerous and vastly failed attempts to pull the woman away from the elevator-machine to allow themselves pass through, the trio settled themselves impatiently at the far base of the bridge to await her child-like attention span wearing thin.  
  
"She's crazy, you know," was Shock's snortine comment after watching the woman pull the contraption up and then back down again on it's ragged pulley system. "She's probably a psychopath.... gonna kill us as soon as soon as we get up there. Probably sucks out the brains of her victims, 'cos if there's one thing she needs more of, it's them." She reclined lazily and rather a little too nonchalantly for her previous sentence on the palms of her hands. Lock leaned foward, stretching long and hard and even managing to squeeze out a small yawn before finally turning lazily to his female assailant.  
  
"Well, regardless of whether she's out to kill us and suck out our brains or not, without her we'd be sleeping in our crypts right now."  
  
"Yeah well... I really don't care." The little witch repositioned herself uncomfortably; the ground beneath them was moist from a small rainshower that had ensued their small journey to the treehouse, yet it didn't seem to have softened the stone-hard soil in the slightest. "She hasta go. And I mean now."  
  
"Can we ditch her now, Lock? Can we please?" Barrel's harsh whisper of agreement sounded coarsely in the demon-boy's left ear. "She's annoying.... and she kinda creeps me out." The pudgy skeleton flinched nervously. Between the stares of his friends, one displaying a look of pure venom and slight threatening and the other a downcast stare of nervousness, he knew immediately it was time for the lady to leave. To him, she had been a valuable portal of information but, like all of the portals he had seen in science fiction television shows, if they were'nt closed ahead of time, massive destruction ensued. With a large and very obvious roll of his eyes, as through not to let them think he agreed with them in the slightest, the pale little boy rose to his feet in a lazy stagger. He walked the short distance to where the ragdoll now resided. Her curiosity with the elevator having long worn thin, she had then positioned herself to the very centre of the rickety bridge, staring with her signature stare of innocence and blind awe into the endless drop to the bottom of the moat-like structure.  
  
"Geez, it's a long way down, huh?" Sally commented lightly, talking in part to herself and in part to the visibly smaller boy, craning her neck to take in a full view of the moat's many and infinate depths. "I hope I don't fall in."   
  
Lock took a step in which to stand parallel to the woman, mimicking her actions and staring intently down the barrel of the endless moat. He could take in uneven cracks and crevices that buried deep into crumbling walls of hard soil. The structure seemed denude of any care or conservation as the remains of it's mysteries were enveloped in a cloak of darkness. Lifting his eyes from the sight, they fixed once again on the awed woman that leaned heavily against the threadbare bridge.  
  
"You should go now. The doctor-" he vaguelly recalled the woman having mentioned someone she affectionately named 'the doctor,' and used it to his benefit though he had no idea who the mysterious character was, "-will probably be worried sick about you." The woman laughed carelessly at his sentence, teetering dangerously close to the edge.  
  
"Oh no, no! See, he taught me how to make dinner for him, and I made some soup tonight and I put everything in the cupboard into it, even the things he told me not to touch." She giggled innocently, conducting the painstakingly slow trek to the safe and steady land just beyond the bridge. "He's sleeping now, snoring away, so he won't even know I'm gone. " A questioning eyebrow on the young boy raised, yet he was immediaely sidetracked before he could think too harshly into the manner. Focusing beyond Sally's waistline, he could faintly make out Shock, one hand raised to her neck in a signature melodramatic throat-cutting notion, as she pointed to him with a murderous glint in her eye. His own rolled painfully; Shock was impatient as anything at the best of times, and it seemed that that particular trait of hers hadn't changed in the slightest after her death, much to his own dismay.  
  
"Look lady, you'd really better beat it. We're tired and grumpy," he pulled a sour face to accentuate his notion. Sally turned incredulously to the remains of the trio behind her, whom of which blinked once in surprise and then promptly pulled their own uncouth faces. Her carefree smile relaxed into a troubled frown.  
  
"Maybe I should go," she lamented. "The doctor is pretty bossy... and grumpy. Kinda like how you look, except worse," she referred to his sour face rather matter of factly, shrugging her shoulders in dismissal. Lock grinned, yet as he watched the woman she seemed to have quietened immensely, turned away from him and appeared as though she was pondering something beneath that thick skull of hers; at least to the extent her underdeveloped mind would allow her to. A hand rose to her cheek, touching it lightly in a troubled manner.  
  
  
  
At last, after what seemed like a lifetime, she reached an arm down the jagged neckline of her roughly sewn dress (obviously something she had accomplished herself, judging by the poor stitching outrageous angles) and pulled from it a small, silver chain that had hung inconspicuously about her neck. Giving it a small, careless tug, the flimsy chain snapped and shrivelled, snake-like, into her stitch-lined fingers.  
  
Outstretching her hand importantly, she unfurled her tightly interlocked fingers about the chain close to Lock's face. His eyes took in the sight of a tarnished silver charm apon the it, moulded expertly into the shape of an evil and quite gruesome-looking cat. Intricate details had been carved expertly into the silver, forming a small, agaped mouth full to the brim with glinting silver teeth and two tiny chunks of uncut emerald made up wide, surprised eyes. Every strand of fur had been carved expertly into it's own place apon the feline's back, and the whiskers, made of tiny, jagged silver rods, balanced uneven on the unproportioned face. Stroking it lovingly with her free hand, Sally pushed it further yet into the boy's face.  
  
"My friend Jack gave this to me," she stated simply, running a finger along the impeccable lines of the charm. "He said I have been very good and I deserved it." Her hand retreated, clasping her clenched fist possessively to her chest . A coil of silver chain slipped through her fingers and brushed lightly against her wrist. She liked Jack; he'd been very polite to her from the first time they had met, and he'd never once told her off for her mistakes or interrogating questions, something she had come to greatly despise the Doctor for doing.  
  
"He's my friend, and he said that this was his.... his Grastitute that he wanted to give to me."  
  
"I think you mean gratitude," Lock corrected absently, his eyeline sliding to the ragdoll's clenched fists in a slight curiosity. The charm had appeared extremely vintage. If he could cash it in somewhere.....   
  
She beamed a warm, infectious grin, cutting through the formulating plot in Lock's mind. "Yes! That's it... It's Jack's Gra-ti-tude." she sounded the word slowly in small chunks as that of a five year old in a vocabulary lesson, beaming as she pronounced it correctly. Her laced fingers slowly unravelling, she thrust the charm foward, a serene smile passing across her features.  
  
"You're my friend, demon-boy. I like you, you were nice to me. But I don't have a Gratitude of my own to give you, I don't think I'm old enough yet or something. So I'll give you Jack's." A slight grin formulating in the corners of his translucent lips, mentally calculating how many bags of candy he'd be able to buy if he cashed the stupid-looking thing in, he outstretched his hand. Slowly and carefully, she took hold of one of his hands in her own, transacting the charm between them. He could vaguelly make out the sound of Shock conducting extremely melodramatic gagging noises behind Sally's back, and could inwardly imagine her overdramatized pantomime of the scene that went with it. 'We'll see who has the last laugh when I cash this thing in,' he noted inwardly, a small smile playing on his face. He eyed the charm greedily- he could have only guessed that the thing was solid silver, vintage and extremely valuable.  
  
"Thankyou," he muttered unenthusiastically, thrusting the charm deep into the unknown and previously unused depths of his back pocket. Sally grinned; clearly accomplished with her actions as she clasped her hands tightly at her waist.  
  
"Lock, we can't take it anymore, it's way too sickening," Barrel called, throwing a hand motion to accentuate his disgust into his words. Both the pudgy skeleton boy and the female in the group had long left the comfort (Or Discomfort, rather) of the stony ground before the bridge. They had both crossed and now resided impatiently at the other side before the daunting cage elevator, impatience glowing clearly on both faces.  
  
Lock turned painfully to the ragdoll. "We're going now.... to check the place out and-" though he was immediately cut of by a rather distressed tone of voice from the woman.  
  
"I can come visit you again?" she whispered hopefully, her balance slightly swaying on her inexperienced legs. He groaned inwardly, yet maintained his emotionless facade.  
  
"Sure," he lied, immediately turning away from the lady and hastily running to rejoin his group, whom of which impatiently awaited his arrival. She waved vaguelly as the trio cautiously boarded the elevator. Unbeknownst to her, they were merely a few minutes away from being faced with the most absolute of evil in all of Halloween Town; an evil that resided silently beneath the uneven walls of the crude little house, an evil that she had led them blindly into the clutches of.  
  
"Look after Jack's Gratitude!" Sally called importantly as she watched them make their tireless journey upward.  
  
*  
  
In only a mere minute or two, Shock lazily watched from between two bars of the metal elevator as the ragdoll wandered away on the path they had duly followed to the house, swaying nonchalantly as she strived with all her might to retain her balance and composture. Good riddance was the only sort of farewell she retained in her mind. Casting her intent gaze upward, she had to admit to herself that the view from the would-be birdhouse was breathtaking, and if she peered hard enough into the distance she could almost swear that she could make out an aura of light and the scraping of building tops- a city perhaps?  
  
"Lock has a Girlfriend, Lock has a girlfriend," Barrel's inane taunting proved extremely distracting, and she turned to give a swift smack to his pudgy head, something of which Lock had already accomplished several times. Yet as she turned back to stare into the horizon once more, she could no longer find the distant lights and buildings; all that she could take in was as the ever lengthening drop to the ground.  
  
"This things gonna snap in half soon and we're all going to plummet to our doom," she mentioned in a matter-of-fact manner, curling her fingers around two of the infinate bars. Lock snorted.  
  
"Can you ever stop being so Neurotic?" He muttered, casting his gaze upward; there was not much more rope nor height to go before they popped through the top of the ramshackle home via a hole in the floor. She mimicked his snort and voice perfectly.  
  
"Only when you stop being such a moron."   
  
"I guess you'll be neurotic forever then," Barrel added. There was a second of silence before both he and his female cohort erupted into peals of immature giggles at the insanely lame joke told.  
  
* * * * *   
  
A/N- I didn't like stopping here, but there was no other wya I could do it. New chapter should be up soon, I guess. 'Till then.... Keep those reviews rolling please! 


	4. The Nightmare ends

A/N- Well, I guess I may as well finish. I didn't really get as much feedback as I would have liked for the last few chapters, so this chapter is dedicated to Locked and Ninkira, who have been very, very kind in their reviews. Thanks so much, guys, I very much appreciate it. Now go read their excellent stories, damnit!  
  
Also, for those who are interested, Ninkira, the best artist in the world and quite possibly the universe, has drawn a picture of one of the scenes in this story. It can be located at:   
  
Please give a huge round of applause to Ninkira and her breathtaking work! Now, on with the last installment of this shitty little story.  
  
* * * * * * * * * *  
  
"Sally! Sally, where are you, you wretched girl!?" A lone voice cut through the silence of the peaceful night as a metallic whurr, sounding as though the purring of a robotic kitten, resided about the dark that enveloped the figure. Doctor Finkelstein, with a face of pure thunder rounded the hill on his electronic wheels, head turning frantically this way and that in search of his newly-stitched creation. His head pounded; he knew that he was suffering from what was the after-effects of Deadly Nightshade poisoning, something she had obviously unwittingly added to his meal while preparing it. He couldn't be certain as to how long he had been under it's enticing effects, or how long it had been since Sally had snuck out of her home and wandered the streets of Halloween Town completely unsupervised.   
  
"Here I am!" a giggling female voice proclaimed; peering down the gentle curve of the hill below him the Doctor breathed in a sigh of relief as the form of his creation came into full view. She looked a little worse for wear, autumn leaves knotted in her thick hair and the stitches at her knees hanging loose and wobbly from such overexherted use on her new feet, but overall it was not nearly as disasterous as he had prior imagined. The relief in his mind melted rapidly after a moment of silence, and a new found anger bubbled over the Doctor's features.  
  
"What were you doing out here, Sally!" he cried, wheeling his way toward her to save the walk. Her infectious grin dissolved into a confounded stare in a matter of seconds as the Doctor took hold of her arms, legs, face, checking and rechecking, poking and prodding for any damage that had been done. "I specifically told you that you were not allowed to go outside without me to supervise you, didn't I?"  
  
"Yes but-" she started, but her lips were pinched shut by the cold hands now examining the slight scuffing to her face.  
  
"No buts!" he cried. "You snuck out without my permission, which in my books is a punishable offence." Her lower lip quivered lightly as it was released from it's vice grip, but the Doctor merely turned away. "We'll talk about your punishment when we get home. It's very late and you need your rest more than anything."  
  
"But I wasn't being bad, Doctor, I promise! I was being very good!" she protested, twisting away from his death grip at her wrist. "I helped a little demon and a witch and a skeleton find a home that wasn't in the icky graveyard where they was." She nodded knowingly to the cemetary that propped itself smugly by the base of a hill in the far distance. "The witch didn't like it, she just kept yelling and being mean and yelling and stomping around and-"  
  
"The Cemetary? New tenants," the Doctor murmered bluntly to himself, referring to the strange, customary way that newcomers were introduced into the World of Halloween. People would simply show up in the graveyard under their own tombstones or inside their own crypts. In a matter of days any memory held in their minds from before the moment they opened their eyes in Halloween Town evaporated from their heads like water on a hot stove and merely formed a forgotten chunk of knowledge clogging the backs of their minds. But they always remembered that something had happened before Halloween Town, that there had been something there, like an unbearable blank space in an otherwise completed puzzle. Nobody knew for certain what this strange custom was, or how it had formed, all they knew was that it happened, and that it should be praised.  
  
"-actually, I didn't really like her all that much. She was kinda too loud and-"  
  
"That's enough," he cut in thoughtfully, whirring his wheelchair around to face his creation. She ceased her inane babbling immediately, standing tall and upright as he had taught her to. "Now, what did you do with the new people?"  
  
"I found them a house," she repeated dully, eyes cast downward as she kicked lightly at the dust with her booted foot. "The demon asked me to. I liked him. But he was small, Doctor, I've never seen people so small! They were like... like little dolls..." He continued to stare in his passive manner as she racked her limited vocabulary for a way to explain the phenomena she had seen that day.  
  
"They were probably children, Sally, like a miniature version of you or I," he added quietly in signature matter-of-fact tones. "There are not many children in Halloween Town for you to have seen before, but it looks as though the population has just been upped slightly."  
  
"If they were children, I wanna be a children too!" she cried suddenly, a grin of glee flooding across her facial features. She overbalanced in her eccentric hopping motion, and sent herself toppling to the ground. A troubled frown playing on his face, the Doctor offered her a hand.  
  
"No Sally, you can't be a child. You're a grown up, and one of these days you're going to have to start acting like one." He brushed the dust vaguelly from the hem of her dress as she shakily pulled herself into a standing position with the help of his hand. "Honestly, what would Jack think of you in this state? You're a mess, and you know how Neurotic he can get... you have to impress your Pumpk-"  
  
"But they were children and they get a house in the trees! Grown ups don't get that, that's not fair!" she retorted in what could have easily passed for sardonic tones laced through her voice had she known what sardonism was. The Doctor's lecture immediately ceased. His back stiffened like a board and his face turned white.  
  
"A house in the trees?" his heart sunk three notches merely saying it. "The treehouse? What about the treehouse?"  
  
"Well they get to stay there, and-"  
  
"You took them to the TREEHOUSE?!" he cried disbelievingly, turning in his wheel-laiden legs and shooting the girl a look of utter and hopeless despair. Her words faultered slightly in her throat. Had she done bad?  
  
"Well.... well yes, but-"  
  
"Sally, do you remember what Jack and I told you about that treehouse?" his voice was that of poison, and spat through tightly clenched teeth bitter and calm. Her lip quivered.  
  
"No," was her small yet utterly truthful reply.  
  
"It's a bad place, an evil place," his eyes turned to the lopsided structure that was visible down the path. There was a flicker of light, a sole sign that life was prowling beyond the abandoned walls, yet he could not make out a shadow nor silhouette of the so-called children that had been led inside. "Oogie Boogie lives underneath that house. I've told you about him before, and so has Jack, on numerous occasions... he is not a person you want to know, Sally, or have know you." He snatched her arm as he spotted a small contusion on her left elbow. "The people that live above him, he always makes them do his dirty work, makes them his.... his helpers," he struggled to use basic words for the ragdoll's very limited vocabulary to be able to understand. "Do you remember when I brought you out last?"  
  
"Yes, there was a parade! And lots of slow music and people all talking very quietly...."  
  
"We were doing that because the people that previously lived in that house and worked for Oogie Boogie were... well... eaten." His eyes lowered to the ground as his grip loosened around Sally's wrist. She bit her lip fearfully. "I fear to think what lies he filled their heads with, and how twisted and exaggerated those lies are going to become in a child's mind."  
  
"Well... Well you're a grown up, Doctor, you can help them," Sally reassured the man simply, patting him awkwardly at the top of his bald head. He swatted her hand away, clearly unbemused and shook his head sadly.  
  
"Pardon my intrusion, but who exactly are you to be helping on this fine night, Doctor?" A extremely familiar voice sounded from behind their turned backs, startling them both immensely as they turned to face the lank figure.  
  
"Jack!" Sally cried, extatic, leaning foward and crashing into her friend in an unbalanced hug. He patted her back once rather awkwardly, his mouth twisting into a strange mixture of amusement and repulsion to the act. Sally was like a child to him; unable to feel more than one emotion at any given time, hard to hold attention, and overenthused at the smallest of gestures. "Oh Jack, Doctor's gonna save some children! They-"  
  
Doctor Finkelstein had spent many, many years attempting to convince his Pumpkin King that he could bring an intelligent being into their world using nothing but his scientifice methods and scrap material. He'd spent seemingly a lifetime attempting to convince him that his creation would have no flaws when it was made, would do no mistakes and therefore was fit to be created. That had been the sole reason Jack had allowed the experiments to go on in his town, his pleading promise that his creation would be perfect, and wouldn't make any trouble. After using his scientific deductions he had come to find that his promise hadn't exactly been all that truthful, or to the point that he had prior expected. When Sally had come into the world, she had not been perfect at all. There had been numerous and seemingly infinate mistakes ranging from broken glasses to... well... poisoning him with deadly nightshade and sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night. But the Doctor would gladly confess all of these things to Jack if only to keep the thing she had done that night a steady secret. He could never let him know that his creation had done something so deadly serious! And after all the promises he had made, Jack would order the girl disassembled immediately on the grounds that she was simply noo mischievious to keep, and that was simply something he could not let happen after all the hard work he had done. Hastily, he threw a hand over Sally's mouth, immediately overpowering her sentence.  
  
"Don't mind her, Jack, she still hasn't grasped the meaning of childhood yet. There was some baby bats that fell out of their nest in the graveyard, I intend to put them back where they rightfully belong," he lied swiftly and expertly with not a kink nor knot to get snagged on. Sally muffled aimlessly in his grip, arms flailing in wild gesticulations.  
  
"I see," Jack replied, "how very noble of you. Would you like some help? With my height I can get them back up in that tree before you can say 'Boo'." He stretched, flaunting his full height.  
  
"No, no, that's quite all right, my boy, but you can do us another slight favour if you will?" As Jack nodded, he reluctantly removed his hand from it's position clamped tightly about his creation's mouth and thrust her foward. She grinned stupidly, yet to his relief did not say another word. "It is very much past Sally's bed time, and I do not intend to keep her awake for another minute. If you are heading that way at all, would you mind taking her home for me? I'll only be a little while longer."  
  
"Of course, I was heading home anyway, it's only a short detour," Jack replied swiftly, eyeing the ragdoll woman nervously as she jumped to her feet in glee.  
  
"That's wonderful, just wonderful," The Doctor seemed preoccupied to the Skeleton man as he conjured his sentence, executing swift glimpses behind his shoulder, as if he were attempting to hide something.  
  
"Is there something wrong, Doctor? You seem a little-"   
  
"No, no nothing's wrong, everything is perfectly marvellous. See that Sally goes straight to bed, no detours to the kitchen, and don't ask her about what happened on our... walk... tonight, she'll only get overexcited and never leave you alone." As the Doctor hastily wheeled away, the proceeds of his sentence, that hung about the duo like heavy fog in the permanent Autumn breeze, dragged into one another and formed a giant, unstructured clump of words. "Word of warning my boy do not leave her alone with poisons or sharp objects and never accept any tea she brings you must dash Sally be good for Jack or else the consequences we were talking about earlier will become a reality," and with that he was gone, dashing as rapidly down the gravelled and uneven path that his electric legs would take him, looking rather comical with his head slightly tilted to the breeze and his fleeting retreat, in reality, barely exceding a few miles an hour. Jack, slightly flustered at the swiftness of the Doctor's escape, turned to Sally, bewildered.  
  
"So.... why aren't you allowed to play with sharp objects, Sally?" He faultered, almost afraid to ask as he turned in the direction opposite to the one in which the Doctor had sped off in, toward the town, toward the warmth and civilisation and away from the cold of the fleeting loneliness. She grinned mischieviously, instantly forgetting all that had happened, merely letting the knowledge slide to the back of her mind while another slid foward; her brain was not yet intelligent enough to juggle two thoughts at one given time.  
  
"Well... ever wondered why the Doctor's in a wheelchair?"  
  
* * * * * * * * * *   
  
"As soon as we got up to the treehouse, Boogie.... er.... extended a very warm welcome to us," Shock's mocking voice permeated through Sally's own internal thoughts of the night in question. Sliding back into reality, she took in a part of the story she never intended to hear before. "It wasn't very long after Boogie threat-... I mean coaxed us into becoming his little cohorts when Doctor Finkelstein showed up."  
  
"He had to be one of the funniest things we'd ever seen," Lock added, grinning with a mouthful of cavity-lined teeth. "But his offer seemed pretty good at the time."  
  
"Offer?" Jack piped suddenly, stepping foward as a discerned look hovered across his face and his arms crossed tightly over one another. The Trio grinned between themselves, a look of utter bemusement etched in all thee pairs of eyes.   
  
"Yes, offer. An offer never to tell you-" the little witch girl poked her finger importantly in his direction, grinning madly, "anything of what happened that night, and how Sally messed up real bad. Unfortunately, we forgot to mention to him that we don't keep our promises." The threesome fondly named the Terrible Trio giggled insanely, matching and bettering the animate hand and mouth gestures produced by the Doctor, present at the meeting and currently stationed in the centre of the aisles, having no other place to park his hefty machinery.  
  
"You promised!" he cried, clear and distinct outrage shining transparently through his features. "You promised that you wouldn't tell if I brought all that candy to you!"  
  
"Oh please," Lock grinned, a rather nonchalant yet smug satisfaction present on his face. "What are ya gonna do about it? Run over us?" The remaining two that made up the trio giggled insanely at his infuriatingly sing-song voice. There was utter silence bar the chalky, squealing giggles. The room was divided like a freshly sliced peach. Some still dwelled on Sally's misfortunes of the night in question, hypocritical eyes bearing down apon her with the weight of a thousand diapprovals, while others had already raised their voices to the Doctor's outraged shouts, defending the groups choice to bring the secret out into the opens. What Jack had so desperately hoped would be a civil meeting, a civil gathering had shattered before his eyes, and now seemed nothing more than an aimless screaming match with no clear cut sides and no clear cut beginning nor end. A small moan rumbled in the back of his throat; it was going to be a long night.  
  
* * * * * * * * * *  
  
It was a sigh of relief that was the first thing the Terrible Trio heard protrude from their Pumpkin King's mouth, much less than what they had prior expected from him. They had expected an explosion of yelling, of abuse, of anger, but none of that was present in the small, aching sigh. He was leaned against the cold stone exit door with all of his weight, eye sockets cast upward toward the tall cathedral ceiling and ears pricked as he took in the last icy remnants of the townspeople's argumentative shouts from beyond the door, the hall. It seemed that the ordeal of adjourning the meeting was harder and less civil than he had ever imagined it to be, and it had taken him every last ounce of energy in his body to remove them from the room before the progressively more heated arguements could elongate any further. He look tired, drained, disappointed. But they did not care.   
  
Sally hadn't moved at all. She was still seated silently at her spot in the center rows, only now she had more room to move after the burly demons beside her and broken into a scuffling fist-fight and had been the first ones asked to leave. She looked pointedly downward at her boots, swivelling the toe around and around on the floor like an imbalanced ballerina. Her mouth pulled taut into a frown, testing the forbearance of the stitches that held them tightly in place. She let out a small sigh. It was very different from Jack's.  
  
"Jack... I was going to... I didn't mean to... to..." she began suddenly in the silence, her words stumbling over eachother as they seemingly fell from her mouth in a long and barely coherant string. She stuttered, rubbing her shoulder distractedly as she turned her head gravely to face behind her, to face him. He had a strange look on his face. One she hadn't seen before. She couldn't tell whether it was bad or good, or somewhere horribly stuck between in a hellish limbo.  
  
"Later, Sally. Maybe later." His voice sounded weak, blunt as he failed to meet her apologetic gaze and centered his weight, proceeding to trudge back up the long isle between the door and the stage in long, defeated strides. The empty pews on either side stared back at him mockingly. The walk of shame, he'd jokingly knighted it to Sally once. She'd giggled vaguelly, nodding in agreement and leaning in and allowing him to kiss her for a second time. The walk of shame, back then he'd been joking. But now he found horrible truths in the words.  
  
"That was an awful thing you did." Jack muttered as he reached the stage, climbing apon it effortlessly and gazing accusingly at the threesome, of which were standing in the centre, grinning from ear to ear. "That was an awful thing you did to Sally, and to the Doctor, and to me."  
  
"I know, wasn't it ingenious?" Lock snickered. Jack's eyebrow raised quizzically and his cohorts nodded in enthused agreement to his words.  
  
"I tried." Jack sighed, turning away from the trio, honestly unable to look them in the eye anymore. "Maybe it's true what they say about you. Maybe you just don't want to be helped. Maybe you really do just want to make trouble all the time and do nothing else with your lives." Barrel inserted a small 'Duh' of which set off the group into peals of squealing, unstoppable giggles. Jack shook his head, lifting his hand and vaguelly pointing to the curtain to the left side of the stage. "Your candy's behind the curtain. Take it and go home. Eat it, throw it at people, I don't care..." He'd now begun the walk of shame once more. Remembering the captivated, curious audience that had once followed his every move as he told them whom of which were to be attending the meeting that night was almost too much to bare. To think that the meeting could have all been well, and to think of what Sally had so stupidly begun despite of his infinate warnings to her had sunk his bony heart down a notch in his chest and disheartened him immensely. He sighed as his skeletal fingers curled around the doorknob of the stone exit door. He could hear the rustling of candy papers and the little squeals of glee from the Terrible Trio's mouths.  
  
"Jack... Can I still..." Sally also did not turn to face him. She twirled a strand of her red hair around her finger like a tourniquet. This one did not supress the flow of blood, albeit would if she'd had any. "Is it still okay that I..."  
  
"For now. The door will be open. You can sleep downstairs if you want to." He pulled open the door with considerable effort and slipped through. Although he was disappointed beyond belief with her, he did not have the heart to send her back to the Doctor and his unbearable new creation, even for one night. "Please don't come upstairs. Tomorrow we will talk." He eyed the back of her head. It had dropped. The Terrible Trio had awful, mocking smirks on their faces. He could only imagine what they were planning next. "And you three stay out of trouble. You've already done enough damage for one lifetime."  
  
"Oh, you know we will, Jack." Shock 's sugar-coated voice murmered, her hands folded obediantly behind her back. He inwardly smiled sardonically, knew their trick inside out. Coyly, he held up his left hand and twisted the pointer over the index finger. They grinned in approval, removing their own hands from behind thair backs. They all held the same gesticulation he did. He raised an eyebrow, mouthed 'be good' and then the slam of the stone door sounded, causing Sally to jump in her seat in fright. He was gone.  
  
Three minutes. Three long, silent minutes passed before Sally stood painfully, brushing down her dress and sniffing in distaste, preparing to leave her place of humiliation. Lock had been waiting between mouthfuls of Jack's finest candy for her to stand, to make any movement, and with that he also stood (Much to the pleasure of his comrades, who immediately proceeded to split his share into equal shares for themselves) and strided toward her. She shot him a withering glare as he came near her and proceeded to move away, but he held his hands palm up as a sign of peace.  
  
He reached deep into the pocket of his red tracksuit, digging around between heaven knows what resided in it's depths to finally pull a long, intricate silver chain from it. Sally's eyes flashed in remembrance as the pretty feline charm popped out last. It was still in perfect condition, despite what she could only imagine being in the pocket of a member of Boogie's Boys was like. He let out a tiny smirk, one that she had come to despise and immensely distrust.  
  
"We don't need Jack's gratitude anymore," the awful smirk continued as he thrust it out before him. It dangled furiously on the thin silver chain. "Maybe it'll help you get back into his good books again. Or maybe not." She took it from him with the utmost of care, looked down apon it like it were a precious stone, stroking it lovingly with her thumb before pushing it hurriedly into her dress pocket as though before he changed his mind and took it from her again. With a small sigh pushing itself up from the back of her throat, she took Jack's forgotten coat-jacket from the back of her chair (He'd forgotten it in his haste to leave) and proceeded to make the walk of shame herself. Halfway between the rows apon rows of pews she stopped, put her hand to her mouth apprehensively before turning back to the Trio, whom of which were arguing about who had the most candy. The look in her eyes was furious.  
  
"Nobody likes a snitch, you know," she muttered vehemiously, her nails digging into her shoulder so hard they were sure that in the morning she would find five crescent moons of torn fabric in her skin and wonder how it happened. Shock swallowed down her last mouthful of candy before snidely replying.  
  
"And it's obvious no one likes you much, either, so we're even." Sally's mouth gawked furiously like a fish pulled screaming from the water. Although the anger inside of her was flaring so high that she could barely see anymore through the hate, she could not think of a single comment to send herself on her way with. And with that she turned in a huff, a slight jangle from the treasure in her pocket resounding about the silent room before the heavy slam of the exit door announced her absence.  
  
"Make sure to tell Jack that you're awfully sorry!" Barrel cried in a meek, mocking way, putting on the airs of Sally's voice as he cried the last of his sentence. Giggles resounded about the once empty hall as they pragmatically piled the candy into their pockets and shirt-fronts as they left, leaving a trail of manic giggles and destruction in their wake.  
  
* * * * * * * * * *   
  
A/N- Ah, took me AGES to finish this, and I still don't like the way it's finished. Maybe it's screaming out for a sequel to me, I don't know. What do you think? Would you like/read a sequel? Please R/R, it's the last chapter! You'll never have to do it again. I'm begging you!  
  
Lastly, a big thanks to the following people: Locked, Ninkira, Dark Destiny (Because I always do), Viv, Heather and Truddi. Thanks you guys, you're wonderful. 


End file.
